Collaboration computing environments often rely on data transfer from a source computing device to multiple destination or sink computing devices. For example, in educational environments, “classroom collaboration” relies on the transfer of files, video, and other data from the teacher's computing device to each student's computing device. Additionally, management of the sink computing devices (e.g., the student's computing devices) may require updates, new applications, or other management software or services be transmitted to each destination or sink computing device. Typically, multicast, broadcast, or other one-to-many data transmissions are used to effect such data transfer to the multiple sink computing devices.
Typical one-to-many data transmission technologies, such as multicasts and broadcasts, rely on acknowledgement feedback from each of the destination or sink computing devices. Such acknowledgments are often embodied as unicast data transmissions sent from each sink computing device to the source computing device to inform the source computing device that a data packet or block has been received without errors. As such, in networks including a large number of destination or sink computing devices (e.g., classroom collaboration environments may include sixty or more students), a large number of acknowledgement transmissions may be generated. The large number of individual unicast acknowledgement transmissions can cause network “implosion” if the destination computing devices attempt to transmit the acknowledgements near-simultaneously. Although some networks may include a “back-off” mechanism to prevent or reduce network implosion, such mechanisms can add further communication delay in the network. Additionally, the unicast communication technology used by the destination computers (e.g., User Datagram Protocol (UDP) or Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)), may require a further link layer acknowledgement from the source computing device. Such back and forth acknowledgements and network delays can occur contemporaneously with each other in the network, which tends to increase the overhead of the network.